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The Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions (FCHES)focuses its research efforts onhealth disparities and chronic disease that cross boundaries and directly affect the Flint and Genesee County Community.

The FCHES is an assembly of stakeholders, including public health researchers, policy-makers, health officials, community organizations, and faith-based partners across a range of specialties to mount evidenced-based and promising approaches to prevent chronic disease and reduce health inequities.

Our Projects

The Church Challenge will support healthy living environments and improve the health of the Flint community, with a focus on effective blood pressure management.

Strengthening Flint Families is a community-based behavioral health intervention designed to reduce behavioral health disparities and improve family resilience in the Flint Community

Our Flint Area Study team is developing a resource of comprehensive public health data in Flint

How We Work

Community is our #1 priority so we work in partnership with community members in every stage of our research. Our Community Co-Investigators actively engage in the research, provide oversight and direction, make decisions, attend team meetings, and have a seat at the head of the table.

Field Research

We do field research and put our “boots on the ground” no matter the weather or time of day. Rain or shine, any season, our data collectors are out in the community meeting with Flint residents.

Field Researchers in Flint, MI

Where We Work

We live and work in Flint, Michigan. Our city is a minority-majority city that is deeply economically distressed. Flint’s challenges over the last few decades and its slide from one of the wealthiest cities in the United States to one of the poorest are iconic of challenges faced by other Rust Belt communities including Detroit, Gary, Youngstown, Cleveland, Saginaw, Dayton, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Pontiac, Canton, Toledo, Akron, Milwaukee and parts of Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Chicago.

Grass-Roots Activism

Despite its challenges, Flint has a long positive history of community activism and involvement, characterized by the 1936 Flint sit-down strike at General Motors. Activism continued through grass-roots community health efforts, which strengthened in Flint as the formal public infrastructure crumbled.

Participatory Research

In 2004, community and health organizations from the Flint area decided that a strong medical school presence in Flint would help address pressing public health issues and drive economic revitalization in the city. Community members met with the Flint-based Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, who commissioned a feasibility study and approached Michigan State University’s (MSU) College of Human Medicine (CHM), based 48 miles away in East Lansing. They determined that a community-participatory public health focus was compatible with both the city’s needs and with MSU’s mission. The feasibility study concluded that Flint was a good site for public health research because it was big enough to matter and small enough to make changes and see results.

Because of the level of activism, passion, commitment, and capacity of community-based organizations in Flint, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine decided to take an unprecedented, community-partnered approach to developing topic areas and hiring research faculty for its new Division of Public Health that would be headquartered in Flint. The faculty would be recruited and hired through a community-participatory search process, with community members and representatives of community organizations making up the majority of the ~25-person search committee. Community members would interview candidates, attend job talks, and vet every applicant as integral partners in the search process. In determining focus areas for these hires, CHM representatives:

Interviewed > 100 community and health leaders, organizations, and community opinion leaders

Completed a community-wide survey

Held community discussions to identify Flint’s most pressing health needs and priorities

Based on survey results, a Community Research Advisory Board advised MSU CHM to focus its efforts on recruiting public health researchers in the areas of chronic disease, behavioral health and healthy behaviors. They strongly recommended the effort focus on intervention research, with particular attention to health disparities and health equity solutions.

The Public Health Academic Build

The Public Health academic build in Flint is truly unique. Michigan State University College of Human Medicine has a campus in Flint because the community wanted it, funded it, and helped to shape it. The University of Michigan (Flint) campus has directed public health practice and research in Flint for more than 30 years. The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) has supported research and outreach in Flint for decades and helped to address some of Flint greatest structural and behavioral health challenges. The Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions connects these academic institutions with community-based organizations to work in full partnership, creating sustainable health equity solutions in Flint.

Why We Work

We are improving the community health for our fellow community members. We live here. We work here. We have family in Flint. We believe that partnerships are the key to successful outcomes. We are working with the youth to train and educate future public health leaders who will do this work for generations to come. Our colleagues, friends, and neighbors motivate us to do better research, engage community in the process, and keep working toward better outcomes for Flint.

Our work involves community-based multilevel collaborative intervention research projects, one focused on prevention of chronic physical health disease/condition (specifically obesity and cardiovascular disease) and the other focused on prevention of chronic behavioral health disease/condition (specifically substance abuse and mental illness). Our behavioral health intervention programs have the potential to improve overall physical well-being for families. Our initiatives will reduce health inequities in Flint and provide promising insights to promote translational approaches in Region 5 and more broadly across the nation.

Find Us

Mailing and Meeting Address
200 East 1st Street
Flint, MI 48502

Building Hours (By Appointment)
Monday—Friday: 9:00AM–4:00PM

The Principal Investigator (PI) for the Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions is Debra Furr-Holden. You can contact her directly by sending an email to Debra.Furr-Holden@hc.msu.edu or calling (810) 600-5668. You can also mail materials to the address above.

Dr. Debra Furr-Holden, Principal Investigator

About This Site

The Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions (FCHES) is a National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD)-funded Transdisciplinary Collaborative Center (TCC) for health disparities research on chronic disease prevention that is specifically focused on Flint with broader implications from the work we do across the state and the nation (NIMHD; #U54MD011227).

To read more about the partnership with Michigan State University and Flint community, click here